The Stolen Prey
by Nookienostradamus
Summary: Chilton has been spectacularly abusing his power over Will Graham at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to no avail. He calls Hannibal in to consult, and Hannibal gives Will what he needs-fuel for both rage and desire, plus some delicious retribution.


'Farewell' is a lying word.

It lies in connotation, impishly hinting at permanent separation. Bodies drawn into orbit with one another, however wide or deformed the ellipse, defy pure chance in the odds of a collision.

It lies in denotation, a powerless wish from bidder to bidden for nebulous, correlative future happiness.

It lies in practice-too often said in heat or haste, and untethered to meaning.

But it is the lie of poets, and so it was the word that Hannibal Lecter used to lie to Will Graham before the former took his leave of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

_Fare you well_.

Hannibal knew as sure as the hand in his coat pocket that Will would not fare well in that dank and windowless room-with even the nattering of lunatics preferable company to his own thoughts. He knew as sure as his lips, where the word still rested, the untruth of its finality.

And Will knew it too, in his way, standing behind the bars, his eyes alive with hate that would take a thousand years and as many deaths to quench. Or, perhaps only one death. Just as well-it would be regretful, Hannibal thought, should he ever see that fierce light fade. To know singularity of purpose so unsullied it becomes compulsion is to attain a certain kind of purity.

This gift Hannibal had given Will, an unprecedented act of generosity. Such was his investment in that most fascinating of minds, so opposed in polarity that it was almost absolved of its ignorance to the fact of its resemblance to Hannibal's own. Almost.

Mystics and charlatans were forgotten by time. Only the deeds of saints and monsters persisted-proliferating, mutating, becoming legend. Sweet, subjugated, martyred, and resurrected Will. Hannibal thought of him often.

Though Will Graham was not on his mind at the time, many, many months after his last visit to the state hospital, that he received a call from Dr. Frederick Chilton.

"Dr. Chilton," Hannibal said. "I must say I'm surprised to hear from you." The man was excrement on a boot heel. Hannibal had decided that if ever Chilton's presence was to be had at his dining table again, it would be as a mute party to the spicing, searing, and serving of his own tongue.

"Dr. Lecter. How are you holding up?"

"In what regard?"

"Well, I understand our Mr. Graham was a pet project of yours. It must be terribly disappointing."

"Terribly," Hannibal said. "Am I to assume that's what you've called about? Is Will your 'pet project' now, Dr. Chilton?"

"I'd hardly say that. But his treatment is progressing rather poorly. Of course, there's no rehabilitation for his kind, but I find it helpful to pick around in those diseased minds. For reference."

"It is," Hannibal said, "edifying. Tell me, how are you proposing to treat Will Graham?"

"What I want is acknowledgement," Chilton said. "Not of me. No, he knows I'm there. I doubt he'll forget it."

Hannibal picked up a trace of something beyond Chilton's usual baseless braggadocio in those words. It made his gorge rise in disgust, just as had the man who had been sitting one table over from Hannibal at Antrim 1844 a week ago. He had reduced the server to tears with his demands, then refused to pay his bill. Hannibal had stepped in to pay both tabs, plus a handsome gratuity. Then he had run the man down on a deserted stretch of Taneytown county road, quickly and neatly removing his larynx while he gurgled in eye-popped disbelief over his mangled legs.

"You want acknowledgement of his crimes," Hannibal said.

"Correct me if I'm wrong, Dr. Lecter, but that is typically an initial step in the treatment path, wouldn't you say?"

"I would. And is Will still in denial of his crimes?"

"I would know that if I could get him to say one word to me," said Chilton.

"I see," Hannibal said. "And you are seeking my...advice? Help?"

"Maybe a little of both." Chilton's voice went low, conspiratorial. "Given Graham's history, I would prefer to avoid another Abel Gideon situation."

"You think he is volatile."

"I know he's volatile. But he needs to be subdued if we're going to get anywhere with his therapy."

"Subdued," Hannibal said.

"Well, you do agree that realization is essential to progress," Chilton said. It wasn't a question. "In order to know his mind, I have to clear it. And to do that takes communication, which he seems intent on denying me."

The sheer presumption almost made Hannibal smile. Will's mind was not Chilton's to know or to clear, nor were his words meant for Chilton's ears. Now taking the shape into which Hannibal had carved him, Will would undoubtedly hang back, decline to expend energy on useless pursuits. His isolation, his fury, walled within the distillery of his cell, would weave itself into a pattern far too subtle for Chilton's perception, because it was meant only for Hannibal's eyes. This new design, not patched together from scraps of insight but fed out, unalloyed, from Will's venomous core, would be astonishing to behold.

"Will needs to trust someone in order to communicate with him," Hannibal said. "He feels he has been very deeply betrayed."

"Not by me," Chilton said.

"Perhaps you are a stand-in, a proxy for the one he feels most betrayed by."

"Well, he trusts you, right?"

"At one point he did," said Hannibal. "Though now I am not so sure." Let it never be said that Hannibal had no talent for deft understatement.

"I'd like you to try talking with him," Chilton said. "Just to see if you can open the door a little. Rekindle some of that old trust. If the paranoia gets worse, he'll shut down completely. I think you and I, as professionals, can both agree that letting a glimpse into that mind slip is nothing short of criminal."

It had happened before, though not often, that Hannibal had sat within a moment of silent contemplation, separated only by a telephone connection from someone whom knew with cool assurance that he would someday kill. Still, it was a rarity to savor.

For now he needed Chilton. As unappealing as it was, Hannibal would take the line extended by so soiled a hand if it led back to Will Graham.

"Try is all I can do, Dr. Chilton. When would you like me to come?"

Having put behind him four hours of sleep, Hannibal woke before dawn on the day he was to return to the hospital, with the express intent of devoting a few hours to his memories of Will Graham. They hummed inside a number of busy rooms in his mind palace, many limned with the red of Will's encephalitic fever, which, while it had blurred the lines of cognition for Will, brought the edges of Hannibal's memories into sharper and more satisfying relief.

He lingered awhile at the scenes of his own kills, making a mental game of trying to see them the way Will had. While they were rendered into Hannibal's recollection by the strong hindbrain associations of sense memory, and layered with tender, baroque detail by his visual cortex, he imagined Will saw them as if on a carousel. Dizzy from the flashing mirrors, the sounds of the Richter organ that pummeled him with horror, Will would nonetheless catch a repetitive glimpse of clarity, new traits resolving with each successive turn.

But not enough to close his grasp on. Will's mind had been adulterated, bending under the influence of his surroundings. Relationships, a job, hopes for an indeterminate _someday._ Some men are not meant for freedom, lest it distract them from their purpose. All Will had now was purpose; it could conceivably remake him into a man deserving of freedom.

On looking at Hannibal again, after these long months, would he see the design that seethed below his skin?

To a casual observer of their relationship, it would seem that Will had seen a great deal of Hannibal, and that Hannibal in turn had shown him much of himself. But the demonstrations were orchestrated to appear within the lighted windows through which Will saw most clearly. There were yet many narrow, unlit hallways leading to these windowed rooms. While Hannibal had granted Will the power to observe in the piecemeal way to which he was accustomed, he was not allowed to see until they stood together in Garrett Jacob Hobbs' kitchen in Minnesota that each blazing pane belonged to the same structure.

By then, the path had been laid, and needed only to be followed.

Inside some of the rooms in his mind, Hannibal saw-and dwelt on-the moments at which Will was closest to allowing the whole terrifying edifice to resolve before him. They were fleeting, overridden by the strain of forces being pushed through the sieve of Will's mind. Close but never arriving. In a session, during interminable trips up and down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Once as Will tried and failed to look through the fog of his sickness at the figure of Dr. Abel Gideon sitting at Hannibal's dinner table. None of the instances, Hannibal remarked, when the skin of subterfuge was stretched almost to transparency over truth, had occurred while he and Will fucked.

Yes, he wandered those rooms in the mind palace, as well. Remembering the shadowy taste and smell of Will's skin. At those times, Will had been content to give up his gift, if only for a short while, to sink and drown in the search for oblivion rather than oblivion itself. Hannibal had been all too willing to indulge the man's selfishness. It was the only time, after all, that Will resided entirely in his own mind, its circuits sparked by Hannibal's hands and mouth on his skin, Hannibal's cock inside him. He was cocooned just as surely as he was penetrated, for once not by the residues of loathsome lesser minds but by the pleasurable simplicity that is enjoyment of another person's body.

Hannibal had taken care to cultivate his skill as a lover, with the same combination of fastidiousness and improvisation he applied to cooking. As a young man, he had taken men and women of his own age to his bed, and sought to broaden the scope of his experience as he aged with partners spanning generations. In the months before he and Will became intimate, he had bedded a soft-bosomed fifty-seven-year-old patroness of the theatre, a violently closeted neurosurgeon in his late thirties, and had despoiled a twenty-year-old Japanese violin prodigy who spoke English with the same sweet and halting precision as that with which she played.

He had enjoyed them all, to one degree or another. Just as he had enjoyed sex with Will.

Will Graham had been no passive lover, though he was receptive. He molded himself quickly into a sparring partner, someone who met Hannibal each to each as they conducted their bedplay. Even when Hannibal, being one to dispense with any romance or flattery, had moved on Will in a way that might have been off-putting to one less attuned.

All that had been required was Will's soft collapse against the ladder in Hannibal's office that led to the upper library level. Eyes closing, the baring of his throat above his sweater-a gesture of exhaustion rather than submission. Still, Hannibal was not one to be deterred by petty differentiation. He had stepped in and pulled aside the collar of that sweater, hearing the groan of the wool against the strain, and placed his open mouth at the join of Will's neck and shoulder.

A noise of soft surprise, and then Will was clutching the sleeve of his suit jacket, encouraging. It had been Will who had taken Hannibal's face between soft teacher's hands, guiding their lips together. They had kissed that evening until Hannibal's jaw ached. And though he was certain that Will also felt the effects, it did little to stop the man, still, from sliding to his knees to lay his warm and open mouth over the curve of Hannibal's erection as it pressed against his trousers.

At that point, Hannibal had stopped him. With a promise. _Later._ And _more, much more._

In that unspecified later, which was not much later at all-both of them were hungry for contact and continuation-Hannibal fucked Will through the throes of fever, pinning his wrists to the mattress so as to keep hold of the man twisting below him in a pool of sweat. And when Will was lucid, Hannibal (pointedly ignoring his own arousal) used mouth and hands to bring him to the point that he came, swearing, on the flesh of his own belly. Will was never incapacitated by pleasure, and Hannibal found it delightful that after each of these sessions, Will would tumble him backward onto the bed, collect the fluid from his stomach before it began to dry, and use it to lubricate Hannibal's cock as he sank down on it to ride his hips with earnest deliberation.

Pleasant idylls, all. But not to last. Hannibal considered himself fortunate that he knew copious pleasures, so many of them beyond the bounds of normal human experience.

Without a sigh or backward glance, as Hannibal found nostalgia useless to the point of distaste, he closed the doors on those rooms, and exited his mind palace to submerge himself in the sensual enjoyment of strong coffee and a good breakfast.

They met in an office adjoining Chilton's-he and Will-which Hannibal saw was designed for this express purpose. Décor was minimal, institutional, the fluorescent-lit cubby poorly disguised as a place for normal interaction.

The desk was bolted to the floor. So was Will Graham.

His shackles were threaded through a thick steel eye hook screwed into the concrete, forcing him to bend slightly, even as he sat. Hannibal supposed (correctly) that this was Chilton's device for creating the illusion of deference.

Will's eyes told him the strategy had no effect, and that pleased Hannibal.

Will looked very, very slender-whip-thin, even-with the tension of contact rolling in steady, regular waves below his skin. He was as tightly regulated as a show horse on a short rein, but controlled by his own hands, ready to explode into motion if given the chance. It was lovely, lovely.

During the first visit, neither man made overtures to begin conversation. Hannibal read silently from the _Konjaku monogatari_. Will stared. Hannibal was only interrupted in his study by the sudden music of chains as the orderlies came to remove Will from his presence.

He was not evasive, nor was he overly descriptive, when informing Chilton of the tenor of their interaction, though he did request that Will be allowed to sit in a more natural position. As encouragement.

During their next encounter, though he had been given considerable slack in the chains that bound him, Will's posture was still stiff, unmoving. He held his back away from the inviting curve of the chair as if he were about to levitate.

"Is there anything you would like to say to me?" Hannibal asked.

Will spat on his mirror-polished wingtip shoe.

"I confess I had a little more hope that Will would open up to you," Chilton told Hannibal during their consultation the following week. "That doesn't appear to be the case."

"Trust is not a thing so easily restored," said Hannibal. "It must be earned."

"We're walking a fine line, here, Dr. Lecter. Will Graham could either end up in my court-our court-or just dissolve and be unreachable."

"I do not see Will dissolving," Hannibal said.

"Hardening, then. Either one," said Chilton.

"That which is hardened can at least be polished to reflect."

"Pretty words, Doctor. Are they covering up your insecurity about your progress with Graham?"

"I have nothing to cover up," said Hannibal. _I have no insecurity_, is what he meant. "Have faith in Will. In the process. Eventually, he will-" Hannibal chose a word that Chilton would enjoy, "-break."

"If you get him to break," said Chilton, "you're a far better man than I." The smug set of his mouth indicated that he considered it an impossibility.

Perhaps these sessions were just as much about an attempt to undermine Hannibal as they were to torment Will. Chilton's habit of chronic underestimation had landed him, gutted, on Abel Gideon's table, with not a whit of lesson learned since. It would be a joy to carve the lips from his face.

And yet Hannibal knew to bide his time; the craving for immediate satisfaction was a hallmark of lesser intellect. His patience, fitted into the unyielding strictures of envisagement, stretched into a line beyond his sight. That which is focused is boundless. He smelled the cool rage on Will and knew that it, also, had no terminus.

For the time being, he parlayed Chilton into a cup of foul drip-brewed coffee, and in his absence pocketed the keys to the shackles. It was not for the purpose of setting Will free, not physically so. He was nearly ready, but still lacked one crucial liberty that even anger enough to fill a prison could not provide.

Will needed hope.

Hannibal read the determination to keep his silence written on Will's face the next time they met in the tiny interrogation room. As always, Hannibal eschewed the desk for a seat in the comically uncomfortable plastic chair, across from its twin, where Will sat. Despite having been given greater freedom of movement, Will remained slumped, balanced on the edge of the chair. He tried not to shift but seemed unable to help himself, the bleach-stiffened prison uniform whispering as he moved, the chains murmuring.

It was high on his shoulder, beyond his line of sight, so Will did not notice the stippling of blood that had begun to rise and seep into the fabric.

"You're bleeding," Hannibal said.

The observation flung Will into a brief and poorly-concealed fit of panic. The panic of guilt, like a child caught out. Childlike, he pulled his hands as far as he could into the sleeves of the jumpsuit.

"Is someone hurting you, Will?"

The answering fury in his stare provoked a swell of pride within Hannibal.

"May I examine you?" Hannibal asked.

"You don't get to touch me. Ever again." Will's voice was hoarse from disuse.

Hannibal brandished the key. Will's face twisted with the shame of being unable to fully conceal that brief, breathless glimmer.

"I'll need your word that you won't attack me, physically," Hannibal said. He tilted his chin toward the closed door. "And I will make certain we aren't disturbed."

Hannibal took several measured breaths in the time that it took Will to decide, watching the war on the man's face like inventive shadowplay.

Finally, he nodded.

Hannibal, key in hand, crossed to the door. "It's imperative that we not be disturbed," he said to the orderlies standing by the guard station. "Even by Dr. Chilton himself. If he asks, tell him that progress is being made, but that any interruption might destroy it."

The door clicked softly shut, and Hannibal flicked the lock. It was a flimsy thing, but his dire warning should be enough to keep even Chilton from snaking his way into the session.

Will looked away, after his old habit, as Hannibal unlocked the cuffs from his wrists. Those wrists were mottled, the raw purple of low-quality beef well up the forearm. Will did not wince or rub them as the handcuffs clicked away, but turned his hands back and forth-palm up, then palm down-as if he needed to reassure himself that the bruised expanse was indeed part of his own flesh.

"What is this?" Hannibal asked.

"Shackles."

"Not these shackles." Hannibal knelt and eased the leg shackles off of Will's thin ankles, setting them aside.

Will paused. Hannibal could tell he wanted to stand, but thought better of any sudden motion that might come across as threat. This limited freedom was too valuable. "No. On the ceiling of my cell. I can stand, but only barely."

"Chilton?" Hannibal asked.

Will nodded. "Sometimes he leaves me there, for a few hours. Afterward."

"After what, Will?" Sudden and sharp-edged rage cleaved through Hannibal's mind. It did not cloud or scatter his thoughts, merely divided them on either side of a line of demarcation. On one side, his concern for Will-with concern defined as need to solely possess. On the other, the host of torments he would visit upon Chilton. Nails. Needles. Flame. Hannibal would eat the living flesh from his bones, spit it into his screaming throat.

"He thinks I'll talk," Will said. "Say anything to make it stop. Give him fodder for his dissections."

Admirably, Will did not startle as Hannibal slipped the buttons of his jumpsuit free and slid the cloth from his shoulders. The line of blood was brighter on the white t-shirt he wore beneath the jumpsuit. Yellow and violet welts, capillary in their density, emerged from the sleeves along Will's upper arms.

"Then talk," Hannibal said. "He has no stake in what you say."

Will turned his head toward Hannibal, teeth bared. "Because there is nothing to say. I'm living the lie you built."

"How often?" Hannibal asked, applying enough pressure to the line of ruptured skin below the shoulder seam of Will's shirt that he cringed slightly away.

"More lately," Will said, looking straight ahead once again.

Hannibal's touch had brought more blood to the surface, blooming crystalline through the shoddy fabric. He breathed in the complex scent, rising even through the reek of institutional bleach.

"The closer you get to me, the more everything goes to shit," Will said, his bitterness unreserved.

"It is you who is prolonging this," Hannibal said, raising the hem of Will's shirt to view the pulped and suffering skin beneath it. His tone was light; he knew already that Will was using the torture of his body to hone his anger. Stubborn Will, true to his name, feeding his hate. "I cannot stop it."

"You are the only one who can stop it." Another hiss.

Hannibal saw that Chilton, or whatever lackey he had drafted into the job, took great care that the blows delivered to Will's flesh were well spaced to inflict agony but not to break skin. The laceration on his shoulder was an accident of carelessness, of frustration. Hannibal had no doubt that should he fully undress Will, the marks would extend down the length of his body.

"Has he-" Hannibal let his speech falter, intentional.

Will barked a laugh. "Has he fucked me? No."

"And no one else?"

"No. That privilege," Will spat, "is reserved for you. In every sense."

Hannibal encircled Will's wrist with his fingers-lightly-guiding it again into the sleeve of the jumpsuit. He had no desire to see more. From the beatings alone, the pale skin would be ruined, years in the healing. But Chilton had left untrammeled the source of Will's beauty, his allure. Hannibal alone would know that mind.

Lips close to Will's ear, he said, "I think you would like to do to me what Chilton does to you."

"I'd like to kill you."

"Yes," Hannibal said. "But then you would truly merit your place here."

"What difference does it make now?" Will asked.

"Every difference. There is no fervor like that of an innocent man."

"That's why you did this? To see my 'fervor?'"

"I have always seen it," Hannibal said. "You have not."

"The only thing I was blind to was you."

"So now you hate."

"Yes. Always."

Hannibal stepped away to unbuckle his fine calf leather belt, and slid it free of the belt loops, handing the coiled length to Will. He felt the heat and tremor in the other man's hands as their fingers made brief contact. "Show me."

Confusion still clouded Will's purity of purpose. Hannibal saw it immediately, and was disappointed. Still, he undressed himself, setting his folded clothing beside the desk, and turned to face the far wall. Hannibal was not a man of blind anticipation, but of informed expectation, examining expanding scenarios and holding them within his mind. He did not care to look at Will's face, to seek information as the choices played across it, light on dark water. One outcome would be the truth of it.

If in any scenario Hannibal had expected mercy from Will, none was forthcoming.

The fact of it pleased him even as he heard the whistle of the lash, the bright multiplying pain winding in a line from the middle of his spine and over his shoulder. He waited a moment to let his breath out. Will inhaled before striking once more, the leather this time dragging a trail of fire from Hannibal's left flank to the swell of his right buttock. When the first involuntary tears sprang to Hannibal's eyes, he retreated behind the walls of his mind palace.

He was not one to keep count as Will struck him again and again; regardless, it would be no true measure of the lengths to which Will could be driven. It was, after all, only an extension of the illusion of control, but one that would revive and redouble any flagging determination on Will's part.

Hannibal only cried out once, when a clumsily aimed swipe curled the leather around his upper thigh and brought the tip into stinging contact with his testicles. It was not even this that stopped the onslaught, but was in the end Will's exhaustion, the limits of his own abused body. Hannibal heard the clink of the belt buckle as it dropped to the concrete.

He turned, the very act of which drove new agonies into his burning skin. There was a brief and peripheral realization that his cheeks and neck were wet with cooling tears, his nose leaking freely.

Will was panting, trying not to clutch at the shoulder that still oozed blood. His eyes widened when he looked at Hannibal.

"You didn't ask me to stop," Will said.

"It was what you wanted," Hannibal said, stooping to allow himself the indecorous gesture of swiping the back of his hand across his upper lip.

"No," Will said. "It was what _you_ wanted. To make me lose control. To hurt someone who was not an immediate threat, not like Garrett Jacob Hobbs. And to _like_ it."

Seeing the sudden resurgence of empathy, long dormant under the festering overgrowth of Will's wrath, made Hannibal so suddenly erect it was almost dizzying.

Will buried his face in his hands. Pushing aside the pain, Hannibal went to him-naked and aroused and bleeding off fever warmth from his wounds-and pried the hands away.

Will's eyes were not wet, but they were flinty hard.

"And to like it," Hannibal told him, his tone gentle.

Will wove his fingers into Hannibal's hair and curled them, pulling tight. He jerked at Hannibal's head-once, twice, a few strands separating from the scalp below his knuckles-then brought their lips together. The kiss was uncoordinated, steeped in the pleasure of combat.

Hannibal unbuttoned Will's jumpsuit and pushed it off his shoulders, unconcerned as the heel of his palm scraped scabbing flesh to bleed anew.

Droplets of vivid red pattered and shook on the surface of the steel desk as Hannibal helped Will ease his back onto its coolness. His face was a demonstration of the erotic counterpoints of pain and soothing.

Mouth once dry from breathing through the pain, but now flooded in expectation of returning to Will's particular taste, Hannibal spit twice into his palm and slicked his cock as best he could.

Breath was suspended between them as Hannibal entered.

The stretching skin of Hannibal's back was ablaze with pain as he leaned in and thrust, bracing his hands alongside Will's shoulders in a fruitless attempt to lessen the agony of his welted skin dragging along the desktop. They moved within a cocoon of flame, tortured and reduced as were the bearers of false witness in Dante Alighieri's Hell.

"I will kill him," Hannibal whispered.

There it was. In Will's face-the hope. "Tell me."

"I'll cut out his tongue. His last meal will be his own blood."

Will locked his ankles behind the back he had beaten almost bloody, drawing Hannibal toward him in anticipation of pleasure as much as avoidance of agony.

"I'll open him along the same scars that Gideon gave him," Hannibal said. "The sutures were only a short reprieve he purchased because Gideon was unworthy. Both of us will watch his gut drain and spill into his lap."

Will closed his eyes, his breath quick and shallow.

"And at the last, I'll take his eyes. One at a time. Because he will never see you as I do."

Will's breath hitched and he came, just as it had always been, over the still-unmarred skin of his chest and belly.

Hannibal used the obliterating pleasure of Will's orgasm to thrust through the pain and find his own climax.

There was little to be said afterward. As they dressed, Hannibal allowed himself to muse through his own discomfort on the empathy that bound him to Will, wound to wound, bleeding into one another.

Though Will would likely be paying little heed to the pain of his body. He stared anew at the monolith of intent before him, taking in its perfect shape, its fatal point, slipping back into the shackles with little resistance.

As void of truth as it had been when first spoken, the poets' lie was all that could be enunciated with any conviction.

His hand on the door, the fine fabric of his shirt sending eddies of pain through the wounds that Will had bestowed on him, Hannibal spoke it with deliberate separation of its component words.

"Fare well."


End file.
